Grade the episode

Excellent

Above average

Average

Below average

Poor

When Clarie's dumb uncle #3 said he was tripped by an invisible man, is that supposed to be Claude (who left the company way before these events ever happened), another superpowered person or just Flint being a moron?

Given all the retconning, it probably supposed to be Claude... even though he left the Company well before that point. I think.

Gotta say Temis your thoughts have helped me appreciate parts of this episode. I'd forgotten the forgive me room completely. And you're right - Angela's backstory was very good. Probably the best part of the episode.

I would have given this episode an average rating (as has been this entire season so far) if it weren't for the fact that it ignored any type of continuity from season one. How short of a memory do they think we have? Didn't Arthur commit suicide? Wasn't Elle isolated and groomed to be an agent ever since she was 4? And the whole season 3 conflicted Sylar rubs me wrong. I miss the season 1 sociopathic Sylar. He was a true villan: Unrepentant and power-hungry. Now, we are stuck with Arthur Petrelli who is a textbook Trekian, scenery chewing, moustache twirler. And now we're back to the eclipse. Have they figured out what its purpose is? TPTB first said that it had something to do with the abilities, then they said it was just a dramatic focal point. Now the previews are hinting otherwise to that! Which is it? Can't they get their own stories straight? Or will it be "fixed" with yet more time travel and Hatian mindwipes?

Angela TOLD Peter Arthur committed suicide, presumably (in retrospect) to keep him in doubt about his own abilities. She was trying, at the time, to prevent Peter from exploring his powers by creating a bit of self-questioning instability in him. But Arthur obviously killed himself just as much as Angela was committed to being a kleptomaniac (which is not at all).

When HRG fed the glass-shattering guy to Sylar, I'm sure we were supposed to be thinking "Oh the pathos! Oh, the irony, that later, HRG's daughter is victim to the same horrors!"

but really I was thinking "Are we supposed to believe HRG just sits and watches this? He wasn't like that before..."

Interesting character work for Sylar, but really inconsistent for everyone else. Having Papa Patrelli at the hospital after the accident... clever, but not clever enough to be jarring - he wasn't there last time.

Trying too hard, devouring itself... this is the first episode I deliberately skipped, but I watched it online after reading the good reviews in here. Thanks for steering me wrong, people!

My primary complaint is that this episode did not do what the other flashback episodes did in the other seasons, which was fill in the backstory with NEW information. I swear that half of the episode was an excuse to tie in Season 3 with Season 1 (there were 5-6 direct tie-ins at minimum).

I also have to agree that Elle was TOTALLY out of character. She was not the same demented person we saw last season.

We still have a billion unanswered questions, including:
-How did Maury Parkman escape the 'mental prison' his son put him in in Season 2?
-Why did Arthur Petrelli create Pinehurst in the first place?
-How did all of the different villains start working for him? We only know how a few of them were contacted.
-What is Arthur's ultimate goal?

I just feel like there are too many holes in the plot right now. I have been very disappointed at how one-dimensional Arthur Petrelli is. I was also hoping that his motivations and goals would be clear, but that is not the case.

More than anything this was Angela's origin story. Seeing the reason she emerged as the Black Widow was exhilirating and gives all new depth to her. Also makes me really doubt Arthur's story about Gabriel. Angela either saved Gabriel's life and hid him away, or was protecting him from the evil fate Arthur had planned for him.

Gabriel's story was pretty enlightening, too. After reviewing the S1 DVDs not long ago, I was struck by the disconnect between the Sylar who scrawled FORGIVE ME a hundred times on the walls of his secret room and the remorseless Sylar who emerged not very long afterwards.

I figured it was just one of those discrepencies that crop up in complex serialized shows and it would never be reconciled. It was a small detail, not something that really required and answer.

But now we know the connecting bridge was Elle and Noah's manipulations. Wow. And they remembered to have Sylar actually say "forgive me" early in the episode to tell us which mental state he was starting with, and foreshadowing where he would be going. Now that's attention to detail that I can appreciate.

Especially with Sylar. So far we have learned in Season 3 that the reason he kills is because of "the hunger" and that he was manipulated by HRG. Sylar was awesome because he was so badass and he was proud of it. I'd rather Sylar made the decision to be evil instead of him being manipulated or having "the hunger" It makes his redemption much more compelling. But TPTB are attempting to sugarcoat his bloody past.

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There's no retconning here. The writers are bending over backwards to explain the FORGIVE ME room, providing an explanation for a small detail I never even expected them to bother returning to. There has never been any statement that Sylar was in control of his behavior. On the contrary, there were continual hints from the first that he was not in control and that he was behaving like an addict.

I saw all the hints from the start, which is why I know for certain they were there for everyone to see. People liked the notion of Sylar being simplistically evil so they didn't catch the hints, but that's not the fault of the writers or producers and certainly doesn't constitute a "retcon." You just didn't want to see it. Well too bad because the writers aren't responsible for the audience's wishful thinking.

And this isn't sugarcoating, either. If Sylar has the ability to resist the hunger, then he is responsible for his behavior. If he were simply insane, and evil in a simplistic manner, then he'd be off the hook. The writers are putting him on the hook, not pardoning him at all.

And if he were simplistically evil, why would he ever change his behavior? The only way for him to be redeemed is for there to be another part to him to return to. A simplistic lunatic only has a straight-jacket in his future. The writers are pursuing this story in the only way that makes any sense, unless they wanted to just kill Sylar around about now, because to keep him a simplistic villain this long would become tedious. Rather than kill off a character, they're thinking of a more creative option. Good for them. They kill enough characters as it is, and if they killed Sylar, everyone would be bitching about how unimaginative they are.

EDIT: another frustrating thing, they never got into why the Petrellis gave up Gabriel.

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I am 100% certain that will be revealed in an upcoming episode. Do you want them to tell the whole story in one hour and then have nothing left over? We got some big massive hints in this episode about the likelihood of Arthur's story about Angela being correct, namely, it probably isn't one little bit. Why not relish this slow reveal way of storytelling? The biggest problem so far this season has been that the story is far too rushed. I am very happy to see them finally slowing down to a reasonable pace and letting the characters re-take the focus of the story, versus a lot of frantic, insane rushing around.

There seems to be a MASSIVE continuity flaw with this thread. I keep reading posters here saying that HRG made Sylar into a killer. Clearly you people were half asleep the entire time. Sylar was killing people before HRG came along. That's why HRG was there. He wanted to know how Sylar was taking the powers of his victims. The guy Daphne (the speed woman?) brought to Sylar was ALREADY ON SYLAR'S HIT LIST. Hello! Maybe someone needs to start firing a couple of you cats for your terribly constructed criticisms.

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Precisely. Sylar was a killer and knew it before Elle and Noah entered the picture. He was trying to control himself and Elle just pushed him over the edge. Why does this mean somehow Elle and Noah are responsible for his behavior at all? If they had never shown up, maybe he'd gone off the rails on his own anyway.

And that was Elle, not Daphne, who provided lunch. But Elle was also the reason Sylar tried to get rid of the hit list temporarily. Because having any sort of human connection makes him feel "special" and therefore stronger to resist the hunger. This also synchs up with his behavior towards Mohinder when he was pretending to be Zane - he was still killing people but started to act like having a "friend" might change his attitude - and totally synchs with his behavior after he found his Petrelli family, which is like what he experienced with Elle and then Mohinder, except in far more complete a fashion because they represent the "important, special" family he'd always longed for - which he told Chandra about in "Six Months Ago" - and because Angela accepts him for what he is, which no one else has ever done.

This all synchs up to a very impressive extent, and far more neatly than in the vast majority of TV shows I watch. Most don't even attempt anything near this level of connectedness and complexity. The main problem here is that the producers know the details of their own show far better than the audience remembers.

But why was Elle so out of character compared to s2?

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I'll give them that as a freebie since we only saw Elle for half a season as a less-than-major character. We saw one side of her and now they're fleshing out the rest. A good, solid, complicated character should take at least one full season for us to get a handle on. Beyond that, any details they want to add must have been foreshadowed earlier, like they've done very diligently with Sylar, regardless of whether people have noticed or been blocking out details they don't want to see.

I also have to agree that Elle was TOTALLY out of character. She was not the same demented person we saw last season.

We still have a billion unanswered questions, including:
-How did Maury Parkman escape the 'mental prison' his son put him in in Season 2?
-Why did Arthur Petrelli create Pinehurst in the first place?
-How did all of the different villains start working for him? We only know how a few of them were contacted.
-What is Arthur's ultimate goal?

I think Maury Parkman will be back - why bother going to the trouble of having him back, without having him confront his son after season 2? Might be giving the writers a bit too much credit, but they set up in Maury's death episode that Matt, his son, with exactly the same powers (as said by Matt himself) could fake his death.

I really enjoyed this week's episode at face value, because I like flashback episodes and I like pretty much all of the characters that were featured heavily this week. Inserting Elle into Sylar's timeline doesn't really make sense, however, and neither does making HRG and Elle the ones who 'created' Sylar in the first place.

The Petrelli storyline was far and away the best bit - Ma Patrelli has always been someone who grabbed my attention, and now she has a little more substance. Christine Rose is brilliant in the role! I was expecting some sort of referral of giving birth to Sylar, or trying to drown him as per last episode. The lack of any mention just left me even more suspicious than I already was at that particular plot twist.

I also have to agree that Elle was TOTALLY out of character. She was not the same demented person we saw last season.

We still have a billion unanswered questions, including:
-How did Maury Parkman escape the 'mental prison' his son put him in in Season 2?
-Why did Arthur Petrelli create Pinehurst in the first place?
-How did all of the different villains start working for him? We only know how a few of them were contacted.
-What is Arthur's ultimate goal?

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My issues exactly.

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bleh. I wasn't expecting all those questions to be answered by this episode. I'm sure it'll come in time...